


UZB-76

by tripwirealarm



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gen, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-09
Updated: 2015-09-09
Packaged: 2018-04-20 00:06:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,489
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4766018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tripwirealarm/pseuds/tripwirealarm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For #RegenerateNine Day.  The Doctor, Rose Tyler, and a distress signal from the deep sky.</p>
            </blockquote>





	UZB-76

There is a long grinding, then a resounding silence, a high pinging like the reverb on a hot mic.  It’s loud enough, repeating on loop with little variation to bring Rose thumping back down the hallway toward the console room after she’d said her goodnights, with huge eyes and a toothbrush still tucked in the pocket of one cheek.  The grind and screech, it’s like an electronic translation of something dragging, a kind of sonic version of broken glass, a sort of metal-on-metal wail that makes the fine hair on her forearms stand tall.  It makes something invisible and slow walk down her spine on a thousand tiny legs.

The Doctor gestures vaguely, a distracted kind of thing where his head lifts enough to acknowledge her presence but his eyes never leave the monitor.  As an afterthought, he twists a few knobs and the volume sinks to a less teeth-gnashing level.  “Sorry,” is all he says.

But Rose drifts toward him anyway, the razor-sharp grinding sound still roaring through the air, amorphous in the way it’s difficult to tell between high tide and static on a dead channel without context for the sound.

“What’s that?” she garbles, words distorted through a mouthful of spearmint suds.

“Distress signal.”

“Feels it, yeah,” she says, squinting involuntarily against the clamor.  “How comes you’ve got it so _loud_?”

“For the background noise.  It’s relooped through a remote receiver, secondary broadcast coming out of rural Russia over a thirty year period, but originating…” he flips another switch, turns a knob, and flicks a glance toward the monitor.  “Someplace else.”

“And you recognize it?”

“Nope.”  He enunciates the word roundly, taking his time with the ‘p’ while he keeps his eyes down, reminding her of something he’s told her about the peculiarities of spoken language, social stigmas surrounding accents, but it’s been a long day and she quite can’t remember what.   She’s developed a talent for generally remembering the random information he spouts the way some people use white noise to help them think.  If only she’d had him around when she was barely pulling a C average.  He gives her that thin-lipped smile before his bright eyes drop their well practiced pretense of mirth and return to the monitor.

“Not the signal, anyway.  Or the station:  call number UZB-76.  The frequency, though,  _there’s_ something.  Suppressed lower sideband, R-3E, like a numbers station.  But here’s the thing, tracking back, every once in awhile–every ten, fifteen years–the signal cuts out, and a little voice comes on air.”  His own voice raises high on the word ‘little’.   “Human, if you’re curious, speaking Russian.  Seems like a list, names and numbers, then back to the buzzing.”

“And, that’s–?”  

“So, the signal is coming out of Russia, sure.  But it’s  _replicated_.  Coming over a microphone.  Somebody in Russia’s tuned into this signal, coming from someplace else, and pointing a mic at the speaker to rebroadcast it out.  And they’ve been doing that for about, well, going back thirty years.”

With a mouth still loaded with watery toothpaste, Rose pushes her eyebrows up, toward her hairline.  “Hold on,” she says, words congested with the minty foam.   She turns on a heel and rockets to the bathroom sink to spit.  When she returns, he’s got the speakers back up with that nerve-rending sonic grind. 

“So someone in Russia’s picking up a signal from somewhere else and rebroadcasting it?”

“Microphone pointed at a speaker, low tech as you like,  _but_ –makes tracing the original signal almost impossible.”  His eyes flash up a moment with implicit amusement, even if it doesn’t reach his mouth.  “Almost.”

“That means impossible for anyone else but you, yeah?”  

“Could say that, yeah.”

“And you can trace it, then?”  It’s at this point where, she doesn’t know why, but there’s already a sense of excitement.  Building electricity in the air like the static charge before a thunderstorm.  It’s the prenatal stages of a new adventure. Something exciting, dangerous.  Something she’s never seen before.  She bundles her cold hands in handfuls of her long sweater sleeves, pulling her knees up sideways to sit in the jumpseat behind where he’s craned over the console.  She pulls her bottom lip between her freshly-scrubbed teeth.

“Doin’ it now, only a couple hitches–”  

There are numbers on the screen, something like parabolic slopes she remembers failing exams on in Algebra, and those interlocking circles that show up everywhere on the TARDIS, a written version of a native tongue Rose has never heard cross the Doctor’s lips–not that she would know, she supposes, with the translation circuits telepathically manipulating every word into something her brain can parse.

And sometime while she was thinking of maths and translation circuits, the Doctor’s face has gone blank.  It’s dropped any trace of smugness or satisfaction, even curiosity.  It’s expressionless, wooden like a doll.  Like she could knock him on the forehead and listen for the echo.

“Doctor?”

Without another word or gesture, the Doctor watches the circles on the screen for another moment before he reaches out and switches off the monitor, and then flips off the sound.  The silence, in the sudden absence of the jagged sonic edges of the distress signal, howls in her ears, louder simply for its absence.

“Doctor, what’s happened?”

Slowly, he casts a glance back at her over the leather horizon of his shoulder, eyes downcast, forehead accordioned up toward his close shorn hair.  “Not coming from anywhere we want to follow, Rose.”

“Where, though?”

He’s silent a moment, processing something without saying.  “The Eridanus Void.”

“Er…”  

“The Eridanus Void.  It’s a cold-spot.  Remember what I told you, cosmic microwave background radiation, thermal radiation left over from the last big bang.  In radio-spectrum…”  He gestures vaguely.  “You look anywhere in the sky, the whole cosmos, nearly the exact same anywhere you look.  Oldest light in the universe.  Point being, it’s uniform.  Almost exactly the same nearly anywhere you look–except  _here_.”  

He flips on the monitor again, plunks his fingers down on a few keys so the text becomes a thermal map, red and yellow dwindling to green and a mass of blue in the center.  Exactly what he’d said:  a cold spot.

“The void, this supervoid in Eridanus.  Lowest density of matter in the known universe, a billion light years across and there’s nothing.  A billion light years of absolutely nothing, not even background radiation.  No heat, no matter, no light.  Nothing at all.”

“And…that’s where the signal’s coming from.”

The Doctor says nothing, he gives something resembling a nod, but seems to give up part way.

“How can that be?”

“It can’t.”

“And…”

“Nothin’ you’d be interested in hearing about, I’m sure, but any kind of signal needs a medium to travel through.  The supervoid in Eridanus is impossible. Just a flaw in the gravitational redshift, parallel branes, whatever you like, but it can’t really exist any more than this signal can.”

“You lost me.”

For a few long moments, again, the Doctor says nothing.  He watches the monitor, leans on the heels of his hands, arms stretched out to reach the edge of the round console with his eyes looking as bright and old as the oldest light in the universe.  

“If it’s a distress signal, isn’t that someone asking for help?  It’s impossible to track except for you, it’s being rebroadcast through an open microphone in Russia, and you don’t want–”

“No,” he says.  He takes the weight off his hands and returns to his full height, turning enough to look her in the eye with his blue eyes mirthless and empty as any airless void she can imagine.  A billion light years of nothing but that hair-raising grind.  An SOS coming from the dark.  “Some doors are meant to stay locked, Rose.”

He doesn’t wait for another question.  He turns stiffly and tells her goodnight, to get some rest.  He can’t seem to manage his well-practiced smile.  

When she’s gone, he watches the monitor, the cold spot map and the scrolling translation of the signal in a chain of numbers, transitioning into a few other versions, symbols, something like Chinese but not, a kind of Morse Code.  The static seems to indicate there may be a audio feed somewhere lost in the degraded signal, but only the video is transcribed, without voice, just motions.  And it’s better that way.  

Because it’s Rose’s face, clearly older.  Four, five years at most.  She looks sad, desperate the way an animal looks in a trap with her clipped back hair and blue jacket.  Through lines of static, her mouth shapes the word “Doctor”, stressing each syllable, shouting it out from the darkness that doesn’t exist.  

Call it Time Lord instinct.  He doesn’t watch the timelines, just glances out of the corner of his metaphorical eye, his mental peripheral, just enough to mine out the uncomfortable truth:  whichever Doctor this signal is seeking, it’s not him.

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by the existence of the actual UZB-76 buzzer, which you can listen to on Wikipedia. And the actual supervoid in Eridanus, which you should google.


End file.
